It’s a dramatic moment, one that would make a great scene in a Hollywood film if Hollywood made movies about Jewish socialist feminists. In 1911, Rose Schneiderman rose in anger at a memorial to the 146 young garment workers who had just died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. Schneiderman had immigrated to New York at eight, lived in an orphanage, and worked sewing linings into men’s caps, organizing the first female local of the socialist United Cloth Hat and Cap Maker’s Union.

Addressing the mostly well-off women of the New York Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), she proclaimed, “I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.”

And yet, as Dorothy Sue Cobble demonstrates in her comprehensive new history For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality, Schneiderman had a more complex relationship to class politics than her impassioned words would suggest. A few years earlier, the leaders of the WTUL gave Schneiderman a stipend so she could quit factory work and go to school. Despite her anger at League members, she continued to organize with them and served as president of the New York branch for twenty years.